I found the link to James Gee’s Keynote address from the Curriculum Corporation conference, August 2006 recently. I then printed it out and read it – making numerous notes in the margins as I went. Then I proceeded to lose the print out. So what follows is a more summary review than what I would have given had I not lost the original!
Learning Games Learning about games, games about learning
Students write on teaching with games
November 14, 2006 — DanielFrom NESTA. No comment on this, as I don’t have time to read it at the moment, but yet another report on teaching with games. This time written by school students themselves this time! Get it here.
Heaven or Hell?
November 9, 2006 — DanielNot games today, but blogs and web 2.0…
Picked up Will Richardson’s book “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms“. It looks like a pretty good book, but I already managed to get annoyed by a couple of things. First, the unnecessary bit about digital natives at the front. For a guy who’s been working in education for 20+ years and who spends a lot of his time teaching children about blogs and how to use them, he really should know that the idea that all kids are experts at this stuff isn’t very accurate.
And in a book trying to encourage teachers to use new technology, what is the point in starting out by telling the audience that they are immigrants and so won’t ever get it quite like the kids will?
The core of the book looks to be pretty good though, and from his blog Will comes over as a very nice and committed guy. But he still managed to annoy me once more at the end of the book…
Selling Second Life
November 9, 2006 — DanielYesterday I did a presentation within my school on the work of the sloodle group in trying to bridge the worlds of the web-based learning management systems and 3D multi-user virtual environments. As part of the presentation I had to try to explain what Second Life is – I took the easy option and used the NMC Seriously Engaging movie to do that for me. Over on his blog, Dave Taylor of the NPL has collected together a set of movies which are useful for explaining what SL is, and for ‘selling’ SL to educators. Check them out here.
Quest Atlantis
November 6, 2006 — DanielJust another link really. Another project that has been using Active Worlds for teaching school children is Sasha Barab’s Quest Atlantis. Again, for anyone interested in researching MUVE’s in education the published papers will be worth reading.
A conference close to home…
November 3, 2006 — DanielTwo of my colleagues at the University are organising the European Conference on Games Based Learning, which will be held in Paisley, October 2007. Long way away yet, I know. I’ll no doubt get involved somewhere down the line.
One game I'd missed…
November 2, 2006 — DanielA link courtesy of Ian, the boss of always_black and Second Life’s _black library.
Management type games are easy fodder for making arguments about the educational potential of games (the issue of transfer aside). But there was one sports management game in particular I’d missed. On Huffington Post, Danielle Crittenden writes about her son playing NCAA Football 2007. This is an american football game where you take on the role of a student athlete: “balance your time wisely between studies, practice, and social events as you live the life of a Student Athlete” it says on Amazon.com.
What this means, is that on top of the sports, passing exams becomes part of the game! This sounds fantastically educational, but sadly it looks like the ‘college’ part of the game consists of multiple-choice questions – made up at least in part of factoids of questionable importance to anything.
As Danielle writes in her piece, her son was suddenly driven to learning about Shakespeare:
“I gotta find out what was Shakespeare’s most popular comedy,” he called out, by way of explanation.
“Is this for homework?”
“No. My player is writing his exams. If he fails he’ll be cut from the team.”
I have to say… which of Shakespeare’s comedies is the most popular has to be one of the least important things to know about Shakespeare. My wife has her degree in English literature and language, and doesn’t know or care which is the ‘most popular’. So, the question is this: what is the educational content of the game, what are players (potentially) learning? Hopefully not that literature boils down to some kind of parade of popular hits.
River City Brain Meld
November 1, 2006 — DanielBeen very quiet on the blog the last week – very busy at work, then a weekend away, then catching up with work again.
To make up for it, a couple of links. The River City Project, led by Chris Dede, uses the Active Worlds multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) as the base for a world which can be used for
“learning scientific inquiry and 21st century skills. River City is an interactive computer simulation of a river town, based in the late 1800s, that combines digitalized Smithsonian artifacts with an inquiry-centered curriculum to engage middle and high school students.”
Dede and colleagues have also published a good many papers on their work, which can be got from here. No relationship with a similarly named Scottish soap-opera currently broadcast in the UK.
I’ll not pass comment till I’ve had a chance to catch up with reading some of this work…
The other link is to BrainMeld, a project which aims to collect and share teachers guides for using (commercial) computer games in the classroom. This seems a very worthwhile project, and it welcomes contributions at all levels – right up to grad school. There are a small number there already – none yet at college/university level though.
